This arbitrary law of mandatory reciprocity actually makes Twitter less useful, because unless you’re incredibly lucky, there are going to be people who follow you who aren’t that interesting to you. Maybe they tweet about their cats all day. Maybe they’re zealots for a religion, a political view or an operating system (cough) that you don’t believe in, share or use. Maybe their entire Twitter feed is devoted to complaints that other people don’t follow them back.

Or maybe they’re following a few dozen people, but you have several thousand following you, and if you follow them all back, then it’s going to flood your feed and you’ll miss some conversations you’d really like to have.

The functional purpose of following someone is because you want to hear what they have to say. That’s why Twitter created the feature; that’s how they suggest you use it.

If you just want to show your appreciation to someone for having followed you, then courtesy already offers a tool for that: the thank-you. It’s been around for millennia, and it has the virtue of being unambiguous. Twitter’s pretty good at delivering it, too.

What’s being invented here with the creation of arbitrary rules like following back isn’t etiquette; it’s a whole bunch of new reasons to take offense at someone else’s behaviour. And when we tell people have to make a tool less useful in the name of being polite (which is what demanding that people use lists to follow the people they’re actually interested in boils down to), all we’re doing is throwing up barriers to genuine connection and conversation.

May it please the court, I submit to you that many of those charged with Twitter crimes should be acquitted on the grounds of reasonable doubt – not just over their guilt, but over whether these should be crimes at all.

Here are four charges that the prosecution (in all its forms) is levelling… along with rebuttals from the defence.

1. The charge: Being followed without following back

The prosecution’s case: If you don’t follow back nearly everyone who follows you, you’re being hostile, standoffish and rude.

The defence rebuttal: My learned colleague has mistaken an arbitrary convention for legislation… and an artificial numerical parity for justice.

Okay, let me drop the flowery language. Just because someone is interested in what you’re saying doesn’t mean you feel the same way. And we all have different ways of listening on Twitter: some of us follow thousands upon thousands of people, segment them into groups and dip in and out of a lot of conversations; others decide they’ll focus their attention closely on a few conversations instead. Who’s to say going broader is better than going deeper?

2. The charge: Linking your RSS feed to your Twitter feed

The prosecution’s case: Twitter is for conversations, not broadcasting. Shovelling your content onto the web is just obnoxious.

The defence rebuttal: Your honour, if I follow Environment Canada’s weather feed on Twitter, it’s not so I can gripe about our recent hot spell; it’s because I want to know what the weather’s going to be like. The prosecution is making a classic mistake of thinking tools can only be used for the purpose for which they were originally created. For many people, Twitter isn’t just a conversational forum – it’s also becoming their alternative to an RSS reader. The defence is prepared to call witnesses from Social Signal who will testify that their most retweeted posts are often the ones tweeted automatically from their blogs.

3. The charge: Responding to celebrities

The prosecution’s case: If you reply to celebrities, you’ll look ridiculous… because what famous person is going to pay attention to you?

The defence rebuttal: My learned colleague from the prosecution wants to have it both ways. Apparently this is supposed to be a conversational medium… yet some are more worthy of conversation than others? Your honour, I am by no means a celebrity, yet I have had pleasant exchanges with them on Twitter. (Of course, most of my conversational salvos have gone unheeded… but that’s to be expected when you’re trying to catch the attention of someone following tens of thousands of people at once.) One of the great strengths of social media is its ability to flatten hierarchies – and fame is at least as vulnerable to that flattening as any other pecking order.

Incidentally, your honour, it often doesn’t matter whether the celebrity sees a response or not. My friends do, and it can spark a conversation among us that goes off in a whole different direction.

One last point: we have one set of prosecutors telling celebrities to follow everyone who follows them because that’s somehow conversational, and another set telling us not to engage in conversation with those same celebrities. The defence is preparing a motion to dismiss both counts on the grounds of whatever the Latin is for “get your acts together, people.”

4. The charge: Asking people to retweet you.

The prosecution’s case: If your tweet is worth repeating, people will do it on their own. Asking them to is just gauche.

The defence rebuttal: Your honour, my client understands that when she is asking people to retweet something, she’s asking for a favour. She’s asking them to spread the word – something we often do in other fields.

And the court will notice she is not deluging her friends with these requests; instead, she makes them judiciously, and repays her friends in kind.

Finally, she understands that these are requests, not demands. She asks politely, and only when she has something of value to share that she especially wants passed around.

In summation

It’s up to you, the jury. Should these in fact be crimes – the punishment being merciless unfollowing? Or should these and other laws be struck from the books? Render your verdict in the comments below.